


Colours That The Morning Reveals

by SayNevermore



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chocobo Farmer!Prompto, Fluff, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 03:43:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14991989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SayNevermore/pseuds/SayNevermore
Summary: Found and adopted as a baby by Wiz Forlane, Prompto was meant to live his entire life as a farmer and avoid trouble. But then the Gods awakened, and everything changed.





	1. Earthquakes And Consequences

**Author's Note:**

  * For [late_night](https://archiveofourown.org/users/late_night/gifts).



> This idea was whispered to me by late_night / ham-for-ham-sandwich on tumblr, and I found it adorable so I decided to write something for her. And then it escaped my control, of course. I hope you'll appreciate it as much as I enjoy writing it! ♥

Prompto’s watch beeped as he stepped out of the shower, eyes still closed and teeth clacking. Despite the tepid water, his head was still filled with cotton, and he took a moment to remember how to turn the alarm off. 

Outside, the sun was just starting to bleach the night sky white. The lightshow that had kept him awake late into the night was finally over.

The Disc had stopped quaking, the crater now empty and dark. 

Prompto found his clothes, then let his feet carry him down the narrow wooden stairs to the first floor, and into the small and dark kitchen. He could navigate around the old and uncooperative equipment with his eyes closed, but he still opened the small window and pushed the shutters open, trying to bring into the room the slightest bit of white and pink light, and the humid air of the outside. He did not expect his brain to be efficient in the slightest before he had coffee, but maybe the familiar smells of the woods would at least spark the ignition for some basic breakfast-making skills.

The grumble of the earth and the purring of the airships, that had become Prompto’s background soundtrack for the last day, had finally left place for a heavy silence. The light entering the kitchen was still pale and grey, barely disturbing the shadows. A rapid look confirmed that the fog was light enough to have disappeared by noon, replaced with only a few streaks of clouds. But the strange heaviness in the air, and the taste of copper on his tongue, seemed to promise a few more storms for the end of the day.

Eyes still looking in the direction of the Disc, and its naked and scorched new look, Prompto put the pan filled with water over the gas cooker and grabbed the coffee grinder while the metal heated, to brew the grains as the observed the sky change colours.

It wasn’t like he was in a rush anyway. These days with the earthquakes and the behemoth, he wouldn’t have dared letting the birds out, and if he came to feed them early they would just be excited all day. Better keep them in the dark for an hour or two.

All the activity at the ranch was slowed down these days, every event within a ten miles radius colliding to jam the ranch’s routine. Their numbers for the month would be disastrous, they were already dipping through the stocks for next month. The only thing that kept bringing some money in was the restaurant, because the few usuals that could still take the road kept coming to visit Prompto. But even the shop wasn’t paying these days - without chocobos to rent, there was no point in buying food for them. 

Wiz slept later and later these days. Prompto slowed down when he walked before his bedroom door, but waking him up for nothing just felt wrong. He could take care of himself, and his father had always been working so hard. At least now the poor man could rest. 

Lost in thoughts, Prompto jumped when the water started boiling ragingly and threw small incandescent drops against his arm. Putting down the grinder and grabbing the handle in one swift motion, he took the pan out of the fire and waited in the middle of the kitchen with his arm raised forward, until the fog disappeared from his glasses. 

The scent of coffee soon filled the air, and he let out a satisfied sigh after the first burning mouthful. Then, because his father wasn’t up to keep him from doing it, Prompto turned the radio on.

“... Commander also stressed the imperial army would continue its recovery efforts in the Crown city. The frequent quakes which rocked the Duscae and Cleigne regions in recent days have finally quieted. In response, the empire provided the following comment: The cause of the tremors was the Archaean, who had awaken in a fit of rage. The imperial army took swift action and laid the unruly giant to rest, thus avoiding disaster. Eye witnesses... ”

“Don't listen to this, you'll just get depressed.”

Wiz put his large hand on the volume button and reduced the voice to a trickle of sound that Prompto couldn't decipher. He moved to the coffee pot and poured himself a bowl, drinking it while standing against the cupboards. He had his crunched and closed off expression, the one he showed whenever he wanted to say “the news have become a big sack of anak shit”, the one that rarely left his face these days.

“You’re up early,” Prompto said.

“Anyone would be with all these tremors.”

Wiz sat at the table next to his son, and stayed here a moment before standing back up and reaching for the coffee. His eyes were bleary and his moves slow. 

“It's true, you think?” Prompto still asked. “They killed it?”

“S’what Nifs do,” Wiz grumbled. 

“They said he was enraged.”

“It's a God, son. Gods have a right to be angry at us. Normal people should understand that moments like this is when you bow and pay your respects, but that's two things the Nifs don't know how to do.”

“We never pay our respects to the gods either,” Prompto pointed out. 

Wiz looked at him over his coffee.

“We work the ground to grow our plants and we take care of the beasts that share this ground with us. That's respect.”

Prompto smiled. His father could grump and mumble under his breath all day long; the lack of activity was taking a toll on everyone after all. But if he still dispensed Prompto with his usual lessons of life, it couldn't be that bad.

“I'm gonna go check on the woods,” Prompto announced, pushing the empty bowl away from him. In the small kitchen, he barely had time to stand on his feet that Wiz had already grabbed his arm.

“Don't think you can run and leave your dirty dishes on the table.” But then, he didn't let go of him. “You've been losing weight, haven't you?”

Prompto shrugged. “It's the morning runs I guess.”

Wiz stared at him, eyes dark but shining under the low eyebrow arches. 

“Not rationing yourself, are you? Times aren't that rough, boy, we'll soon get back on our feet.” 

Prompto rolled his eyes.

“I'm not. Calm down, I’m not seven anymore.” 

Honestly he wasn't seeing the difference himself. His belly was still soft and his hips still large, filling his clothes nicely. Still, Wiz made an ambiguous noise as he let go. 

“Remind me to cook some meat for you for lunch anyway.”

“Sure!” Prompto shrugged before darting away.

He only had time to hear Wiz scream “your bowl!” before he left the house.

 

The morning runs had become a habit since there wasn’t anything else to do around the farm. His father, of course, would say that there always was something to do around a farm, but there were only so many times a boy could chop wood and clean the stocks before going crazy. He didn’t go very far, just around the farm, not even through the woods. But it felt good, and it passed the time before seeing the birds. 

By the time he was back, the sun was rising high enough in the sky for the world to have settled into its daylight colours, and even the birds in the stable should be starting to perceive the change. But he had one last step to go through before he went to feed them.

Re-entering the house, he held his breath and listened intently until he was sure that the sound he was hearing was the shower, and sneaked back into the kitchen. Grabbing a knife, he cut two large slices of overcooked bread, wrapped them in kitchen roll and carefully swept the crumbs before taking them out. 

He was halfway through the field when the shadow of a huge magitek airship obscured the ground around him, and the sound of rotors filled the air. The dark block of metal stopped above his head, lights blinking white and red as it started its descent towards the ground. 

Prompto had half a minute to choose a direction before he got crushed, and he made a decision in half a second. Holding the bread close to his chest, he sprinted straight towards the caravan at the edge of the field.

That thing had no windows; the Nifs shouldn’t have noticed him. Except if they had screens, or radars, which they probably have. Shit. He should have thought this through. Too late now. He dug into his shorts’ pocket for the key and opened the plastic door.

The sound of the rotors was still very obvious from the inside of the barely sound-proof caravan. Prompto left the food on the kitchen counter just next to the door, and in one, two long steps, made sure the green curtains covering all of the minuscule windows blocked the view from the outside. Shit, shit, shit. He had known, from day one, that this wasn't the best-case scenario. That in the case of a Nif inspection, there was no other way out of the place, and no place to hide inside. He thought he'd have time to think about it, come up with a plan. He thought, actually, that maybe he wouldn't have to worry about it at all, after the tremors had stopped.

A soft thump reached his ears through the constant purring of the rotors outside. He turned his head towards the origin of the sound, heart pounding in his chest, finger already against his lips.

 

Standing against the doorframe separating the living space from the bedroom, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, looking slightly more colourful than she had since the day he had found her in the woods, hunched her shoulders and raised her hands in apology.


	2. The woman in the bed

Like a thief in the night, Lunafreya limped towards Prompto, who pushed her shoulders down to make sure that, even through the closed curtains, nobody would notice her shape or shadow.

“Nifs?” she asked—probably. Now the airship was covering their whispering voices, and Prompto had to rely on reading her lips. He nodded, leaning against the thin plastic wall of the caravan to take a peek by the window without showing himself or moving the curtains.

He had not seen the moment when the airship had opened, and, from this angle, could barely make-up what was happening outside. He could count at least two silhouettes on the ground—no, three? but he couldn't get the details of their uniforms. They didn't seem like they were MTs, had no helmets and no visible metallic parts or armours. Worried that they could notice him, he stepped back again and met Lunafreya's bright blue eyes, staring at him.

He raised three fingers, then the realization of the situation he was in hit him back fully, and he forced himself to breathe. Three Nifs wasn't much for a thorough inspection of the entire place; he might have a chance to move the princess from one location to another without anyone noticing. Instinctively, he took a look at the ankle that was still swollen and red. Maybe she could move fast enough to hide in the forest for an hour or two, just long enough for the Nifs to leave? He wasn't even sure they were here for an inspection. He had never heard of Nif officers inspecting places anywhere in Lucis, to be fair. But what if they started, now, and found a princess hiding in the caravan? He needed to know why they were here. That was the first thing. Then, he needed to be able to warn Lunafreya in case she had to move. For this, he needed...

He took his phone out of his shorts' pocket and handed it to Lunafreya.

"I'm gonna check outside," he whispered to her. If you need to leave, I'll call you on this phone from the house. Don't move unless I say so, okay?

Outside, he heard his father’s voice call over the Nifs. Lunafreya nodded.

Prompto took a deep breath, and opened the door. 

The first person to catch his eye was the brown skinned, leather-wearing giant who turned his head when he heard the door creak on its hinges. His jacket was open directly on his torso, muscle showing even from where Prompto was standing. Right behind him, the other guy, the one that actually looked like a nif executive with the suit jacket and the fair hair, moved to place himself between Prompto and the third of their party. And behind them, Wiz raised his eyebrows at his son. 

Prompto couldn't exactly just dart away somewhere and escape the confrontation, but as he stepped towards the group, he could feel his heartbeat increase and his internal temperature raise, and he did his best to keep a straight face and not stare too hard at the new, strange guests and their strange clothes.

Prompto never had the opportunity in his life to see Lucian Black with his own eyes, the closest thing he knew being the square of black fabric that a hunter had offered to him once and that he used to cover the weird scar on his arm when he was wearing tank tops. In the countryside, black was difficult to dye, but he knew that people in the capital could wear fabric that looked almost like the pure black of the royal court. The hunter had told him that this was where his scarf came from. And that--leather jacket, suits, boots, pants, everything--was not his black. That was deep, rich, expensive black.

These guys weren't Nifs. These guys couldn't be Nifs.

Except, well... he sure wasn't that much interested in politics, and probably couldn't have given a detailed analysis of the situation to save his life, but he was pretty sure he could say the situation was a little more complicated than that, lately.

"And here's my son,” Wiz commented once he stopped in front of the group. “Prompto, what were you doing in the caravan?"

Prompto gulped, resisted the need to scratch his throat. “Uh, cleaning? You know, after all the earthquakes, I figured it would need…”

The man with the suit and the... coeurl-patterned shirt? stared at him without saying anything but with enough intensity that Prompto felt like he was going to melt.

“Cleaning?” his father repeated, doubtful.

He could sense the lie. They all could. He was lying in front of people from Insomnia. Seeing the current situation of the country, he couldn't be tried for that, right?

What was he supposed to do? He knew he had to keep Luna hidden from the empire but neither she nor the other woman had said anything about keeping her hidden from Lucians or not. And she certainly hadn't said anything about Lucian officials dropping from a Nif airship. Were things so bad that Lucians had changed camps?

“Yes?” he decided to insist.

“These men would like to rent it,"” Wiz said, with the tone that sounded like he was making a deliberate effort to believe Prompto rather than doing it in good faith. “You could help with the keys while I get them registered?”

“I, uh, I, it's... it's not ready,” Prompto panicked, trying and failing to not blush under the added gazes of the giant and his colleague. “I still need to... I need to go fetch... something, and…”

He glanced towards the door of the house, wondering if he could just dart towards the phone, call Luna to ask her what to do, and do that without getting in trouble. He was fast. All his training had paid up. But it wasn't just about being fast enough to outrun three... three what?

And just as he asked himself that question, the guy in the fancy suit jacket got pushed aside, and the one guy that he was hiding to Prompto's view stepped forwards, and looked over his shoulder straight towards…

“Luna!”

And he ran, before Prompto could decide to do so himself, in the direction of the caravan.

By the time his brain had managed to process everything, Lunafreya had managed to climb down the three steps of the door and had thrown herself in the arms of…

well, Prompto didn't watch TV often but the situation didn't leave much room for doubt. The black clothes, the black hair, the fact that he was pretty sure he could read a name on Luna’s lips right before she disappeared in the boy’s embrace.

That was the prince of Lucis. And Prompto had almost run on him to go warn the princess of Tenebrae--and his supposed bride--to flee before he could find her.

At least now he was sure that these people weren’t the empire, so that was one less thing to worry about, but… hadn’t that guy been announced dead weeks ago? 

Did that mean that he now had two people to hide from the empire? 

Luckily enough Noctis Lucis Caelum seemed to busy reuniting with the Oracle to pay attention to him. That left Prompto only one tiny thing to deal with.

“Did that woman just get out of our caravan?”

Prompto felt his father's hand grip his shoulder hard enough to keep him in place. That was the grip of a man who knew his son inside and out.

Prompto sighed. There was no way out of this one.

 

And so he found himself sitting at the kitchen table an hour later, waiting for his dad to finish "taking care of everything with the customers", fiddling with his t-shirt in the relative silence of the farm. He hoped his father would also think about feeding the birds, they must be getting impatient at this hour. Maybe that was why he was taking so long, or maybe Prompto was just bored out of his skull to wait for his lecture.

When finally, Wiz Forlane entered the kitchen, he didn't look at Prompto; he walked to the sink, washed his hands, started putting the dishes back into the cupboards.

“So how long has she been here?” he asked, making Prompto roll his eyes while he couldn't see him.

Of course he was going to do this.

“Just a few days,” Prompto mumbled, not seeing the point of lying anymore but not wanting to admit the truth either. "I was going to tell you!” he quickly added. “I just…”

“How… how did she end up here without me knowing?" Wiz cut. "Did she... did she pay for the stay at least?"

“Dad!”

“What!" Wiz finally turned around, looking sincerely confused, which made Prompto feel a little bad. Okay, yeah, it probably was a weird thing to discover for him. “It’s a camping spot, here, not a shelter. What if anyone else had come to ask for a place to sleep during this time? And I had given them the keys?”

“No one comes here these days!” Prompto protested. “And I would have told you, but she asked me to keep it a secret and... what could I do, lie to the Oracle?”

“You watch you tone, young man.”

Okay, okay. Prompto forced himself to breathe. He didn't want to get angry at his father, and he could understand his point of view, but this was clearly not how he had expected to broach the subject with Wiz and if he was perfectly honest, he hadn't exactly taken the time to think about what he was going to say to his father. Actually, he thought he could just let Lunafreya rest in the caravan as long as she wanted, and then she would thank him, and leave, and he would never have to deal with this ever again. 

“I just... found her in the forest, okay? I mean, just on the other side of the road... and she couldn't walk, and she needed a place to rest, and I thought it would be like, one night? But then she said the Nifs were searching for her, and she couldn't leave yet…”

He could hear how dumb he was and his fingers once again played with the fabric of his t-shirt.

“I just thought I'd help…”

His father sighed.

“I know. But it's dangerous, you understand? And I couldn't have helped you if something had happened because I didn't know. Prompto, we’ve talked about this.”

“I know.”

With his left hand, he clasped his right wrist where the bracelet hid his tattoo. He could never forget about the black lines on his skin that marked him as something different, something special. Wiz and him were not stupid enough to have never noticed the similarities between the imperials and Prompto--the blond hair, the fair skin, the faint freckles on the cheeks were too rare in Lucians to pass as a coincidence. But their conversations stopped at the practical--don’t show it, don’t act weird, don’t put yourself in trouble. The reason behind the lines, the exact kind of trouble it could cause if Prompto was revealed as a marked Nif… these things simply lingered in the background, unanswered and unquestioned, until something brought them closer to the surface. 

“I know you're not a child anymore but you can't make decisions like that without telling me, okay? It’s a question of safety.”

“Yes, I get it… I didn’t mean to hide her from you… ” 

It simply wasn’t a subject that he could simply broach at the breakfast table like everything else. No matter how his father had taught him to talk about everything, what was he supposed to say? I found the Oracle in the woods and a weird lady in black clothes asked me to let her rest? Even he could see how this sounded like a trap. Simply, it was the Oracle. He decided to have faith. Apparently, faith didn’t protect against parents lecturing their children.

“And what about the prince?” Prompto asked. “What are we doing about this?”

“Well, they paid,” Wiz answered. “And it’s our king, now. If the Nifs come to get him, it’s his duty to be prepared. Not ours.”

“He came in an imperial airship,” Prompto pointed out. That detail still obsessed him, wouldn’t fit in the mental image he had created since he rescued Lunafreya in the woods. There were good guys, there were bad guys, and then there was him, desperately trying to fit in the first category and ignore the tattoo on his wrist. 

His father talked like Prompto forgot about it, like he could forget about it. As if he wasn’t carefully measuring his gestures around everyone to keep his wrists out of their sight as much as possible.

“We’ll get to the bottom of that,” Wiz mumbled. “But he’s here, and he’s not hostile. And at least, he’ll take care of your other problem.”

“Don’t call her that.”

Wiz shot him a look that was more amused than it was suspicious. 

“You talked to her at all, all this time?” he asked. 

“Not more than necessary.” Prompto rolled his eyes at his father. “Stop making it weird.”

“Not making anything,” Wiz shot back. “I’ve been young too. Would’ve loved to have such a good excuse as yours to bring a girl back in my room.”

“She wasn’t in my room, and she’s engaged, and… wow, I don’t even know why I’m having this conversation with you.”

“You wouldn’t have to if you had told me about her as soon as she arrived.”

“Wow!”

Wiz snorted with laughter as Prompto stood up, slowly making his way towards the exit. Mumbling about feeding the chocobos, he left the house as fast as he could to go lock himself in the stables.

This weird day was just starting, and he was already exhausted.


End file.
